New York minority officers forced to meet quotas or face punishment, lawsuit alleges

Minority officers with the New York Police Department face racial bias within arrest and summons quotas, and, compared to white officers, are disproportionately punished for failing to meet those standards, according to a new lawsuit.

The suit, to be filed Monday in Manhattan Supreme Court, alleges
that black and Hispanic NYPD officers are punished more than
white cops for failing to meet their quotas, which required at
least one arrest and 20 summonses issued per month.

“At this point, you either come up with the numbers or there
is hell to pay,’’ Bronx Officer Adhyl Polanco
told The New York Post.

Polanco said that when he called attention to the alleged quotas,
he was told by a supervisor, “If you think one and 20 is
breaking your balls, guess what you’ll be doing. You’ll be doing
a lot more.”

Another supervisor threatened Polanco with steeper punishment, he
said.

“Next week, [it’ll be] 25 and one, 35 and one, and until you
decide to quit this job and go to work at Pizza Hut, this is what
you are going to do until then,” the second supervisor said,
according to court papers.

Polanco and another plaintiff, officer Pedro Serrano, gave
testimony in 2013 over quotas related to the NYPD’s notorious
stop-and-frisk program, which was deemed
by a federal judge to be a systemically racist
policing strategy that violated constitutional rights.

During the stop-and-frisk trial, Serrano testified that his
performance evaluation subsequently dropped in every category,
evidently for failing to meet the quotas. During a meeting with
his supervisor, Serrano was told that his performance score was
based more on his “numbers” and his “low
activity.” At the time, his precinct’s captain is said to
have informed him that the NYPD’s Operations Order No. 52 allowed
her to implement “performance goals,” likely a veiled
reference to quotas.

Much of Serrano’s testimony supported accusations
that officers who refused or failed to meet quotas were subjected
to discriminatory treatment. Serrano pointed to the fact that he
was transferred to an undesirable post, denied a day off
following a car accident near his home, and his personal locker
was vandalized, including the placement of “rat
stickers.”

Polanco and Serrano’s attorney, Emeka Nwokoro said the new quota
lawsuit is the first involving accusations of racial bias, the
Post reported.

Serrano, who is Puerto Rican, said when he appealed to a superior
over fines he was offering in the South Bronx that were not
affordable to Puerto Ricans living in the area, he was told it
didn’t matter and that they were “animals.”

According to the Post, seven NYPD traffic officers plan to file a
separate class-action lawsuit alleging they were denied
promotions and lost vacation time as punishment for protesting
quotas.

In another NYPD-quota case, a federal appeals court last week
ruled for an NYPD officer who blew the whistle on a quota system
within at his Bronx precinct, saying his speech was protected.

Officer Craig Matthews exposed the illegal quota program and was
punished harshly for it. He was “given punitive assignments,
denied overtime and leave, separated from his longtime partner,
given poor evaluations, and subjected to constant harassment and
threats,”
according to the New York Civil Liberties Union, which filed
the lawsuit on Matthews’ behalf.